A woman in her 50s with urinary incontinence is a cold-blooded professional killer. A bald, potbellied shop owner is an arms dealer. A seemingly ordinary college student is suddenly swept into a war among assassins.
In Kang Ji-young’s thrillers, characters look familiar but rarely turn out to be what they seem. The same goes for settings: a neighborhood supermarket or butcher shop can be more than it appears.
Kang’s novel “Mrs. Shim Is a Killer,” credited with helping open the door for “K-thrillers,” is set to be published in more than 20 countries in the first half of this year. In a recent interview at Seoul Chaekbogo in Jamsil, Kang said the overseas attention is “because the characters are Korean,” adding that “there also seems to be a culture forming worldwide that ‘Korean things are hip.’”
Kang will begin a book tour March 28, starting in Paris and continuing to Lyon, Poland and Hungary. She called the results “very joyful,” but said she also feels “a sense of responsibility.”
“I’m excited, but I’m worried, too. I was lucky to export one work, but my work can’t end up blocking the path for other writers,” she said.
Kang works across genre fiction and literary fiction, as well as webtoons and web novels. Disney+ released the 2024 drama “A Shop for Killers,” based on her work “A Shop for a Killer,” starring Lee Dong-wook and Kim Hye-jun. After the success of Season 1, Season 2 will be released within the year.
Her books are known for quickly drawing interest in adaptation rights. Readers cite vivid descriptions that make scenes easy to picture, along with black humor that can prompt a laugh even amid sharp violence.
Kang said she does not plan stories with screen adaptations in mind. She attributes the strength of a “super IP” to everyday life. She writes on a strict schedule, sitting at her desk at 9 a.m. and ending manuscript work at 5:30 p.m. “There was a time when it was hard to survive if I didn’t write diligently,” she said.
“I have a child. A kid can’t grow on dreams alone,” she said. “I worked hard. Until my late 30s, I held a job while writing novels. Writing becomes meals, academy tuition, and school lunch money. That process itself was a period of growth. I feel not only accomplishment but a lot of pride. I didn’t choose writing as a high-end hobby.”
Twists on familiar people
Kang’s characters often begin with people around her.“The female lead in ‘Gama-goe on a Giraffe’ borrows some of my younger sister,” she said. “Jeong Jin-man in ‘A Shop for a Killer’ is a stand-in for my father, and Shim Eun-on in ‘Mrs. Shim Is a Killer’ draws partly from my aunt. After losing her husband, she raised her siblings while running a butcher shop. I took the basic setup from that. That’s why readers can find pieces of ‘our mom’ or ‘my sibling’ in my work.”
Then comes the reversal: the middle-aged woman becomes a knife-wielding assassin, and the potbellied man a major figure in arms trafficking. Kang also often portrays women in their 20s and 30s as resilient people who “keep walking forward to find a way out.” Early in her career, she said, most of her short-story protagonists were men and women were often reduced to victims of violence. “As I started writing novels, I thought, ‘As a woman, I should make women into active characters,’” she said. “That’s why many of my novel protagonists are young women just stepping into the world.”
That approach also shapes the three-part “A Shop for a Killer,” which reads like a coming-of-age story as protagonist Jeong Ji-an collides with the world and grows tougher. “Even without landing a full-time job, I wanted to portray a woman who faces the world in her own way — not a beginner anymore, but an independent person,” Kang said.
Kang linked that to her own 20s. Raised in Paju, she said she had to become independent after entering a university in Seoul. “Back then I worked part-time jobs relentlessly. I started working and earning money at 21,” she said. “It felt like the world was picking on me for no reason. At some point, my family felt unfamiliar. I started devoting myself to family after I had a child. That’s when I moved from being Jeong Ji-an, the niece, to Jeong Jin-man, the uncle.”
Dangerously convincing lies
Many characters die in Kang’s novels, yet the stories can feel oddly cathartic. “Doesn’t everyone have at least one person they want to kill?” she said.“Doesn’t everyone think at least once, ‘I want to kill them cleanly’ or ‘I want to get rid of them’?” she said. “I’m just carrying out, in a story, what’s hard to do in real life.”
She said the same logic applies to suffocating relationships. In “Gama-goe on a Giraffe,” the protagonist cuts off family ties. “I wanted to tell readers, ‘If it’s harmful, you can cut it off,’” she said. “You have to find your own path to happiness. For people who can’t bring themselves to do it, I want to give them at least some vicarious satisfaction.”
Kang recently finished the novella “Dokni.” Its protagonist is described as a composite of South Korean female serial killers including Go Yoo-jung, Lee Eun-hye, Eom In-sook and Kim Seon-ja. “There are many cases of killing someone they loved with poison, so I titled it ‘Dokni,’” she said. Through a woman in her 70s who is released on parole after 29 years and one month, Kang said she examines, from a skeptical perspective, “whether humans can truly be rehabilitated.”
A separate work centered on a traditional Catholic exorcism rite is set to be published around summer. Kang said writing it was so difficult that she suffered sleep paralysis throughout the process.
Often labeled a “young writer” or a “storyteller,” Kang, who is approaching 50, said she no longer cares about such descriptions.
“I sometimes describe my job as ‘someone who cleverly lies without getting caught,’” she said. “I keep making lies that feel real, on a razor-thin boundary. I don’t care what I’m called. It’s enough if readers fall for the world I created.”
* This article has been translated by AI.
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